Okay, so... not a drabble. But still under five hundred words! Which makes this one, what? A quintuple-drabble? Close enough. (Now I want to write a thousand-word story to be able to claim a deca-drabble...)
This takes place in that moment during the last three minutes of 'The Job' -- you know the scene I mean, when Jim has just found the note in his sales figures and David Wallace starts asking him about his future. This is what we all know happened behind that stoic Jim mask, while we were all yelling at the TV: 'No, you idiot, don't do it! You love Pam, remember? Pam! Come on now, don't string the romantic tension out for another season!'
At any rate, here's the story.
The Long Haul
"So – the long haul. Where do you see yourself in ten years?"
In that moment, the yogurt lid became a mirror, a mystical scrying pool in which Jim saw, clear as day, his future. The question that pounded in his head wasn't where he saw himself in ten years – whether he was promoted, fired, retired. Those things didn't matter. Instead, Jim heard the real question, which David Wallace didn't know he'd asked. That question was: If, starting from this moment, you never go back to Scranton (to Pam), what kind of person will you be?
Ten years. Take the Stamford feeling and multiply it by ten years. Take the relationship with Karen, the terrible silence on the other end of the phone line, the black coffee and no more pranks and expand it to – how long? One hundred and twenty months. Three thousand, six hundred and fifty midnights that felt like drowning.
But he was being unreasonable. Scranton was only two and half hours from New York; he could drive down, have lunch or something, maybe once a week. He could have glimpses of her, carefully rationed echoes of her laughter. An addictive poison in insufficient does while she lived her life, made friends, and fell in love, and he climbed back into his fancy car and drove back to the lonely city.
But he was being unrealistic. Taking this job would not be the end of the world; it would be nothing like death (no matter how similar they felt).
Ten years… he might be married. (He would be alone.) He might be content. (He would be a walking corpse.) He might be happy. (A skeleton with a tinfoil heart.)
Impatient, David Wallace cleared his throat. Jim asked himself the big question, the real question. That question was: Can you survive ten years in this city? Can you survive ten years with Karen? Ten years without Pam?
The only surprising thing about the answer was how little it surprised him.
When Jim left that place, he left the quarterly numbers on the table; and with them he left all the numbers, all the reasons, all the logic and the part of him that chose security, that chose Karen.
When he left Corporate, he took only the golden yogurt lid, tucked into the breast pocket of his sleek black suit. The tinfoil pressed against his skin like a hand over his heart.
(Ten years of mixed berries and laughter; he drove ten miles over the speed limit all the way home.)
Review, please!
